


blue remembered hills

by northerntrash



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Emotional Intimacy, Facial Scars, Grief and Guilt, M/M, ace!barduil, build-your-own-family, end of the world survivors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-15
Updated: 2017-06-15
Packaged: 2018-11-14 10:35:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11206290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northerntrash/pseuds/northerntrash
Summary: The world ends, not with a bang but with years of war and the extensive desolation of an earth that has finally had enough. One day, man will be gone from its surface, but in the meantime, the survivors live, as best they can, among the wastes of it all.In which Bard decides to help some strangers, and is helped in return.





	blue remembered hills

**Author's Note:**

> My entry for the Barduil mini-bang! Check out the rest of the collection for more wonderful entries.
> 
> Art by the fantastic [shippingagenda](https://shippingagenda.tumblr.com/post/161895721098/blue-remembered-hills-by-northerntrash) and [miryokae](http://miryokae.tumblr.com/post/161858528967/blue-remembered-hills-by-northerntrash-into)! Thank you so much guys!

_Into my heart, an air that kills,_  
_From yon far country blows_  
_What are those blue remembered hills,_  
_What spires, what farms are those?_

_That is the land of lost content,_  
_I see it shining plain_  
_The happy highways where I went_  
_And cannot come again._

A. E. Housman

 

* * *

 

These things start innocuously enough.

A few articles from the media outlets more loosely connected to the governments; a few more following soon after in the left-wing newspapers. Small things, barely worth mentioning. A minor natural disaster in a far-off country that no one cared too much about. A car spontaneously combusting, mechanics unable to find out why. The odd body washed up in a distant river. A small bill passed here or there by governments no longer answerable to their people.

Nothing major.

And then, before anyone knew it, the breakdown. War came first, but war always does, and the planet’s own response followed soon after. Night ice buckling the metal of trains along the equator whilst people slept. Lawns browning under the intense morning sun in the northern hemisphere, forest fires in countries known for their rainfall. Streets looked different now, all across the globe. Quieter. The trees died, withering where they stood as if poisoned by some unseen enemy. Brickwork crumbled beneath the intense changes in temperatures. The lights went out.

Adverts on billboards and on the side of buses that no longer drove, no longer went anywhere. They were months old, then, all of a sudden, a year old, when once they had been changed almost weekly, it had seemed. There were more important things to care about now, like _why hasn’t mummy come home today,_ and where you would hide if the bombs fell anywhere near you, wave after wave of them.

Because if there is one thing that you can guarantee, it is that the governments survived the initial combustion of civilisation, holed up in their bunkers and their manor houses, unwilling to stop the wars that sprang up as soon as the earth began to sour, as soon as the fight for supplies and resources outstripped any consideration for the people left, hiding in the ruins of once great cities.

A sudden year of change, and then, against all expectations, it got even worse.

The rains came.

Countries used to monsoon seasons collapsed; those used to more moderate rainfall barely survived. The rain came as if a blessing to the earth from some prehistoric God, one who had been here long before man and who cared little for our brief time on this earth. It fell for four weeks, all across the globe, an intense humidity that left the bones aching, the skin sweltering. The usual impact of intense rainfall came, of course – the flooding, the avalanches, the mudslides, the drownings. But it was far worse than all of that. Those caught out in it, those who had been outside when first it fell or those who had tried to venture out before it stopped, in the desperate search for food or water – they died. Burnt through, skin blistering and peeling back to reveal flesh, muscle, then finally bone.

A purging rain, the survivors called it afterwards. Acidic. Sent to cleanse the world.

When the rains finally passed, those who had weathered the storm – like Bard, and his children, holed up in the small supermarket outside his village which had survived the worst of the early looting – came out to a world changed. The constant barrage without easing at any point had altered everything. All green had been stripped from the earth, leaving just the brown-black scars of a landscape devoid of life. Many of the buildings were gone, only those left of steel and the densest stone had survived.

When the survivors came from the darkness of their buildings they saw a world stripped of much of mankind’s handiwork. A barren land, a desolate land, where already an oozing moss was beginning to grow, ripe with the stench of decay, a colour so dark it could barely be called green.

The sky was no longer blue: the haze of the bombs from the war – now pointless, now over – had made sure of that. Now it was an unending sepia, as if the rain had stripped the colour from that, too. You could look straight at the sun – now it seemed to the survivors a pale shape, without true form or colour, without warmth or comfort. The land seemed cast in a perpetual shadow, used as they were to the glare that had once been theirs.

Once upon a time there had been blue sky and green grass and red brick and a yellow sun that had burned down through millions of miles of emptiness to shine light and life on strange little animals called man, ones that had learnt to walk on two legs and scrawl down scratches of their words upon the earth. Ones who had taught themselves to think but never to learn, who had been given all that they could have asked for yet still yearned for more, who had forced the land they lived on to such an end that nothing should have survived.

But, for better or for worse, some things did.

 

* * *

 

It was years after the rain stopped when Bard saw him. He had lost track somewhere along the way exactly how long it had been. It had been months since he had seen anyone at all, and for that, he was grateful, for all that there was an aching void of loneliness inside himself. They had been in their current position for well over three months, and soon they would have to move on: in the meantime, he maintained his position on the high ridge that overlooked the tiny village, binoculars sweeping from one side of the village to the other, watching for anyone who might approach.

He slept with relative ease at night, despite knowing that there was no one taking watch: no one was stupid enough to travel in the dark anymore.

The man was tall, and there was a strength to the wide set of his shoulders: he held himself, even in this world, as if he had once been a great man, though like all other great men he had fallen low in the decimation of the world. He was dressed, like every other survivor Bard had seen, in a stained tangle of fabrics that had once been other garments, fashioned together into layers to protect against the heat of the earth, the cold of the sky. His hair was a white-blonde that Bard had not seen in a very long time, and he wore it pulled back, down to about his shoulders. As Bard watched the man ran a hand through it, the movement abortive at the end, as if it had once been far longer, and the man still had not adjusted to the new length.

There was a confidence about him that was almost an arrogance as he surveyed the land around the embankment that marked the east end of the village as if he were a King surveying his kingdom. For a moment Bard almost wanted to hate him for that confidence, for the way the man held himself, as if the world going to shit hadn’t affected him at all, as if he hadn’t even _noticed._

And then he turned, and Bard pulled his own lip between his teeth, for there was proof enough that the man had not been untouched. The skin of his cheek, from jaw to hairline, had been burnt, the flesh left raw and ragged still. It did not look a new wound – indeed, it looked much like the patch of skin on Bard’s arm that had been caught in the rainwater the first time he had sent a cautious arm outside the window when the rains had started. Lucky enough it had been at the start, before the rainwater had grown more potent. The man seemed to have met the same fate.

With a sigh, Bard hefted the rifle against his shoulder. It would give him no pleasure, but he had learned early on to be wary of strangers. The unknown brought dangers, to him and his supplies, but more importantly to his children. Rather kill the man now than kill him later, after the damage was done.

His finger on the trigger he took a deep breath, then released it, staring down the length of the gun at the man, hesitating just a little as the man turned, bending to offer a hand to someone beneath Bard’s line of view. Damn it – more of them. He would have to be quick.

And then, abruptly, he let go of the trigger.

For the man had not been helping another adult to the top of the embankment – adults he could have dealt with, he had had many bad experiences with adults since this shit-show had started.

But not children.

And children they were, as impossible as it might have seemed, for Bard had not seen any children other than his own since before the rain. But there they were, impossible to deny – a girl with red hair clipped close to her skull with fine, pointed features, and a boy, similar enough to the man that he must have been his son, with messy blonde hair and a slight smile around his mouth, as if he had just cracked a joke and was waiting for the rest of the world to catch on.

Children were another matter altogether.

He could fire shots, aiming deliberately wide to scare them off – and he would have done, on other days. But there were the clouds for his conscience to contend with too. Already they were boiling on the horizon, one of the _dangerous_ storms. They were nowhere near as bad as those that had fallen to burn, but they would be painful none the less, fatal after too long, and it would be too long before they reached anywhere else with shelter fit to weather out such a storm. It was why they had stayed here for as long as they had – rarely did anyone make the distance over moorland and mountain to find these places, risking the weather. It was why Bard was delaying leaving it – the old truck that he had converted to run off cooking oil in a different time was starting to show her age, and every time he was forced to reinforce the roof he felt a sickening dread.

These people had not come in cars. If he drove them off, he would condemn them to death. Better to shoot them here, except he couldn’t bring himself to do that either.

He sighed, a little.

Damn morality.

A stupid thing to survive the collapse of civilisation.

In the end he approached them towards the evening. He walked towards them with his arms raised, letting out a long whistle to announce his presence from a distance before the man nodded to say he could come closer, the two children tucked behind him. The man's body was tense, coiled like an animal, waiting.

“My name is Bard,” he said, as he drew close enough to them to be heard. “There is nothing for you here, and none of these buildings are strong enough to weather a long storm. I’ve checked them all after rainfall.”

The man’s face tightened, his eyes calculating, his hand hovering around his hip, where no doubt a weapon was concealed.

“The storm will be here in a few hours,” Bard continued when no reply was forthcoming. “We have supplies, and you are welcome to join my family and I whilst it passes overhead.”

The welcome felt bitter on his tongue. The man’s eyes narrowed a fraction.

“Family?” he asked, in the end, and Bard nodded.

“My three children, and myself.”

The man still seemed uncertain, but his eyes twitched to the sky, and the approaching cloud. He did not have much of a choice, even if he did not believe Bard, and they both knew it. In the end he nodded once more, and the three of them followed Bard at a safe distance. When they came to the entrance of the old church that they had made home (plentiful wood for fires, old stone roof providing the best protection) he bade his children stay outside as he followed Bard inside.

Sigrid already had the fire lit, and she smiled at him when he came in, deftly lifting a pot of something onto the tripod above the fire with her one arm, but she took a step back when she caught sight of the other man, hand going immediately to the pistol on her hip.

“Don’t worry,” Bard told her, aiming for reassuring. “I offered to let him stay with us.”

 _I’ll explain later,_ his eyes promised, and she nodded, slowly.

The man was busy glancing around the room, obviously searching for other people. His good eye took in everything – the laundry hung on makeshift lines across the remains of the pews, the axe buried in one, ready to chop more wood. Bain had appeared from one of the back rooms, his body tense at the sight of a stranger, but he didn’t say anything – not unusual. And then Tilda was with them too, barrelling across the floor to lock her arms around Bard’s legs, her eyes wide as she too watched the man, whose shoulders seemed to relax, just a little.

“My name is Thranduil,” the man said, to the children rather than to Bard. “I’m sorry for startling you. My own children and I are going to shelter in here, if the three of you are okay with that.”

Sigrid nodded slowly, and Bain just continued to stare at him, face expressionless. But Tilda’s eyes lit up at his words: even her fear at the appearance of the stranger was not enough to dull her enthusiasm.

“Legolas,” Thranduil called. “Tauriel. It’s alright, come in.”

The two children from outside crept in, coming slowly through the doorway, cautious at first and then throwing themselves across the floor much as Tilda had done to stand beside their father. They both took hold of his hands and Thranduil let them, even though it meant leaving him unable to draw.

“You are safe here,” Bard said, slowly and as kindly as he could manage. “But I have to ask you to leave your pistol in the safe box at the door. We have a good set up here, and I have my kids to think about – you understand, I hope.”

Thranduil was clearly torn, for a moment, before nodding. It was obvious that there was little choice here. Bard carefully watched him disarm, checking as well as he could for any other hidden weapons, and following suit Tauriel and Legolas both removed guns from their belts. Once they had done Bard beckoned Bain and Sigrid forward. They raised their eyebrows at him, but placed their own weapons inside as well. Bard followed suit, before locking the metal box firmly with the key hung around his neck. There was one more pistol, hidden carefully in his bedding, but he hoped he would not need it.

“Storm’s coming,” he said. “I’m going to bolt down the doors and windows. Bain, Sig – will you heat some water for our guests to bathe?”

He tried to ignore the quell of disquiet that ran through him as he went through the process of shutting down the church – shutting them in with a complete stranger. But though there was a niggling sense of concern, he was nowhere near as frightened at the prospect as he might have been. There was something about the man – his concern for his children or his caution or his steady movements – that made Bard, if not convinced, then at least not too afraid.

By the time he was done water had been heated and poured into the plastic tub behind the screen, near the fire. Tauriel was in the bath, behind the screen, the slosh of water giving her away. Legolas was crouched by the side of the screen, eyes following everyone carefully. Water for the next bath was already being heated: Sigrid was watching the boy with some humour in her eyes.

“Thank you,” Thranduil said, quietly, low enough that none of the children could overhear. Bard hadn’t noticed him stepping closer, too busy running over the windows in his head, mentally checking that he had managed to lock them all down. There was a strange intimacy to that, and Bard felt an odd prickle at the back of his neck, not unpleasant, but deeply unfamiliar in these trying times.

“It takes a while to heat the water, but we’ve found it is worth it. We keep tubs out in the good rain, store as much of it up as we can. Sometimes being clean makes you feel more human than just about anything else.”

“Hygiene is a foreign concept in the new world, though when I say new, I of course do not mean better,” Thranduil said, catching Bard off-guard. His voice was surprisingly wry, unguarded, and Bard found himself smiling, without quite meaning to. “It is very much appreciated.”

“Is that what you call it?” he answered. There was no official terminology for what had transpired, no names for the horrors that had been inflicted on them. “I just call it the shit-show after the shit-war, and be done with it.”

Thranduil smiled, a strange thing that only curled up the side of his face that was not scarred.

“The Great Destruction is what they were calling it in London, before we left.”

Bard didn’t have to ask why they had left the cities.

“They called the First World War the Great War too,” he said, in the end. The words taste hollow, but he doesn’t really know what else to say. “Before there was a second and a third and a fourth. Don’t tempt fate.”

He moved closer to the fire, but not before he caught the sound of Thranduil’s quiet huff of laughter.

They spent the first night in relative silence. After they ate, they curled up on their bedrolls, without saying much to each other. The two camps slept far apart, on opposite sides of the fire. Bard fell asleep that night to the sound of more breathing than normal, and tried to ignore how good it feels.

 

* * *

 

 

The rain is still thundering on the roof the next morning, and showing no sign of relenting. They go about their normal ablations as usual, both halves of the group keeping a wary distance until Tauriel seems to shake something off herself and goes to help Sigrid, who is raking over the fire, clearing the ashes to make way for new wood. Bard goes over their inventory, methodical and precise even though he has it all memorised, his own habit for days like this, when they are trapped. He glances at them all from time to time, trying to quell the excitement of new people that don’t seem to be here to kill them. It is a well needed reminder that there are still people like him out there in the world, people with fingers holding on to the small and spider-fine cracks in the world, trying to stay alive.

Thranduil is watching him, he realises after a while. It is subtle, but there is no malice in his gaze. It is the wariness that all must cultivate in these times, and Bard knows why he is concerned. There is no way that the storm is going to pass in time for them to leave before nightfall, which means another night with strangers.         

In the end the staring just becomes annoying, and he takes the last quarter-bottle of whiskey he has left, pours it into two battered old metal beakers, and carries them over.

“You can stay until the rains stop,” he tells Thranduil, as he settles beside him. “I’m not going to throw you out, and if I were going to attack you, I would have done so last night.”

Thranduil doesn’t reply to that, but takes the cup none the less. He winces at the taste, and Bard watches the shape of his tongue probe the inside of his ruined cheek, the scars contracting and moving oddly.

“We have no way to repay you,” Thranduil says, eventually, and Bard shrugs, lying back against the stone.

“Tell me something from your story,” he answers. “I haven’t heard a new story in many years.”

The silence goes on for so long that Bard thinks he will get no response, that he has been too forward perhaps, that he has pressed for too much. He watches Bain watching Legolas watching Sigrid and Tauriel, who are now speaking quietly, instead. They have relit the fire already, a waste of fuel on a normal day, but the rain-days always pass quicker with the gentle crackle of flames.

“I was deployed a week after we first declared war, spent the first two years on the front,” Thranduil tells him, his eyes lost to the firelight, and Bard did not ask which front, because it didn’t really matter. The horrors of all of them were well-reported. “When it became clear that it wasn’t going to get better I defected, like hundreds of others. Once that would have been unthinkable to me, but in the end all that mattered was my son.”

Bard glances at the girl, too far away to hear what they were saying. She is looking at Sigrid’s arm now, and his daughter is shrugging, running fingers over the smooth stump just beneath her elbow.

“I found her just before the rains,” Thranduil replied to the unspoken question. “Her parents were killed, and I wouldn’t leave her behind. Hard enough as a child, far worse as a girl.”

Bard feels the familiar constriction in his stomach, and his eyes flicker despite himself to his own daughters. He knows well enough.

“I assumed she was yours,” he said, meaning it as a comment about the evident trust and love that there is between them, but Thranduil’s gaze is hard and cold when he turns it to Bard.

“She is mine,” he says, a warning in his voice, and Bard realises he has been misconstrued. He doesn't blame him. The fear is always there in the back of his own mind, too. 

“I did not mean it like that,” he replied, trying to be reassuring. “I have daughters of my own. I would never-”

He trails off, and Thranduil is still searching his face, but he sees something in Bard that seems to reassure him, and he turns back to the fire.

“What then?” he asks, not really expecting much, but to his surprise Thranduil continues. He tells Bard about London, about the bombs and the gassing and the root cellar where they mostly lived, about the looting and the desperation and how they had kept Tauriel’s hair cut like a boy for a while, referring to her with male pronouns when they were out. About the land rover they had driven out of the city until it was out of gas, about the cities they have tried since, searching for civilisation and finding only chaos. Thranduil speaks steadily, with little inflection, but Bard isn’t sure if the man could stop now.

He wonders how long it has been since Thranduil has last had someone to speak to, and if he feels the same way that Bard does, all of the time. There is an aching void of loneliness inside him that has been there ever since his wife had been killed in the early years of the collapse: he had his children, and he thanked anyone that might have been listening for the fact that all three of them had survived, relatively unscathed, but he was their father – he was there to protect them as best he could, and there were things that he could not bring himself to burden them with.

Fears, mostly.

Thranduil keeps going on, turning then to the future, whether to quit the once-united-kingdom or now, whether things will be any different over the channel.

“I could go there, I suppose. Maybe Paris, maybe Berlin- who knows? Rome, Prague, Amster-fucking-dam. Did England get hit the worst? Who knows? But you can walk through the Channel Tunnel still, I know that much.”

Bard shrugs.

“Long way to go without hope.”

Thranduil nods, and sighs.

“Long time since I’ve had any of that, anyway.”

Bard quirks an eyebrow – there is no real response to that. The two of them sit in a silence that is oddly companionable as they watch their children. Sigrid and Tauriel are still talking, and Tilda has edged closer to the fire now too, flicking idly through one of the books that she has found in the back room. Legolas is clearly listening to the conversation and occasionally finds himself chipping in, only to then look horrified that he has been involved. Bain sits the furthest out and says nothing, but that isn’t unusual.

Bard catches his eye, and smiles. The grin he gets shot in response is surprisingly bright.

“They seem to enjoy having people their own age to talk to,” he says, quietly, making sure they don’t hear. “They miss having friends that aren’t their siblings – Sigrid especially, she remembers it best.”

Thranduil nods.

“As do mine.” He turns to Bard, quite suddenly, drawing his lower lip between his teeth for just a moment. “What do you miss the most?”

He doesn’t expect the question, but he has an easy answer for it anyway.

“I miss light. The bright, harsh lights that we used to have.” Not the uncertain candlelight, is what he means, or the flicker of pungent oil-lamps in the soft, cold darkness of now. Not the glow of a fire slowly dying, changing disconcertingly when you are drifting in and out of sleep.

Thranduil nods, and doesn’t push him to say anything more, but suddenly Bard feels the need to, feels it rushing out of himself against his will, the urge to share something with this man stronger than anything else. “And whenever I stop to think about it, I miss not being afraid all of the time,” is what he finds himself saying, and he knows that it sounds stupid, but he doesn’t care.

“It lives there constantly with me, and I need it, and I hate it. There are some days when I feel claustrophobic, as if everything is closing in on me, though everything out there is empty space. But they used to say that you could feel alone in a crowded room, didn’t they, so maybe I can feel crushed when there is nothing around me for miles.”

They go to help with dinner after that, but Bard feels strangely lightened, as if he has emptied a heavy pocket in a coat that he hadn’t realised was as full of stuff as it was. He and Thranduil do not say anything more to each other that night, though they catch eyes when Tauriel and Sigrid lay their mats next to each other, still talking. After a moment of hesitation both turn to their fathers and roll their eyes in almost perfect unison before indicating the ground next to them. Bard feels a surge of relief at the invitation, laying quickly down with his back to his oldest, as he always does.

He dozes off to the gentle voices of the two girls; he thinks he hears Sigrid crying at one point, low and soft, though he isn’t sure if that is a dream or not by morning.

The rain is still going, heavier even than before, and he and Thranduil share wary looks once more. Legolas spends the afternoon pacing the room like a caged animal whilst Bain lies on a pew and stares at the ceiling, his eyes wide and lost in something Bard cannot see. He keeps an eye on his son as he goes about his tasks: this is normally the sign of a bad day.

“Is he alright?” Thranduil asks, towards the end of the afternoon, when Legolas has taken to jumping from pew to pew and Bain still has not stirred his gaze.

“He’s… he is what he is. I don’t think he has ever recovered from some of the things he has had to see. He gets… I suppose he gets lost sometimes, in it all. He’ll come out of it soon enough.”

Thranduil doesn’t ask – he doesn’t need to.

“Sometimes I feel so fucking helpless,” Bard whispers to him, this strange and sudden confidant. “I wish I could take all the things that are poisoning him and take them into myself, but there isn’t any way to do that. Sometimes I want to speak to him about things and I choke on the words, gag on them until I want to rip the skin of my neck to pieces, shred it all to let them out, to breathe again. And I get so tired, and angry, and afraid, because I don’t know what to do and I don’t think there is anything I can do.”

Thranduil is watching him carefully: he nods, just once, before he puts a hand on Bard’s shoulder. The warmth of his skin is shocking even through clothing: Bard resists the urge to close his eyes at the sensation of physical comfort.

It has been so long.

So desperately long.

He thinks about it all as they make dinner, together. It has been a very long time since he has trusted anyone, and he is certain that he would not have confided in someone this soon before shit had hit the fan. Maybe he has changed, or maybe Thranduil is different. He can’t be certain – he knows to grab hold of important things now, to live in the moment, but there is also something about Thranduil that seems to call to him, that plucks some deep chord within himself, that makes him remember all the most beautiful things about having someone to lean on, to confide in. And Thranduil understands, he is doing the same thing as Bard, struggling through trying to be the best father he can be when the world has gone to hell, trying to stay strong when all he wants to do is break.

They talk more as they eat, as the children go to sleep, as Bain shakes himself from his stupor and joins them. Sigrid pulls him closer without words, folding her body around his, her amputated arm resting around his ribcage. Tauriel brushes Tilda’s hair, humming a slow and sad song until his youngest daughter is yawning, and curls up at Tauriel’s side, facing her brother, close enough that she can reach out and hold his hand. Legolas stares at the four of them lying together, before lying his own bedroll along the top of theirs with a huff, clearly not wanting to join them but also not wanting to be apart.

And whilst they do this, Bard finds himself telling his own story. All the years of fear and doubt and shame, those times when he did what he could and those where he still feels he could have done more. The first man he killed, and how he threw up afterwards. The first night his wife had not come home. The desolation when he had been forced to amputate his daughter’s arm after the lower half had been crushed by falling rubble. The fever that had nearly killed Bain. The men that had nearly killed Tilda. The worst of it all that he has carried as a lodestone, his story.

And Thranduil takes that story, just as Bard had taken his the night before. It shouldn’t make a difference, Bard knows – those things have still happened, he hasn’t undone history by sharing it – but it _does,_ he feels better for it, and in the gentle firelight and the soft sound of the rainfall (lighter now than before) he feels as if he is transforming, shedding from himself some great and terrible cocoon of pain that he has been labouring to remove. Thranduil’s eyes never leave his, those beautiful, mismatching eyes, and not once is his expression anything other than warmth, and acceptance, and compassion.

In the end Bard cannot help himself. He reaches out, and traces the dark shadows underneath Thranduil’s eyes with the pads of this thumbs, one piercing grey and bloodshot from tiredness, the other a haze of milky white. It is the most he had touched a person other than his children in years, and it hurts as much as it comforts.

“I…” he says, before realising that he has nothing else to say, no words that can properly explain. But Thranduil nods, as if he understands, and in that quiet moment Bard realises that he does, that perhaps this meant the exact same thing to Thranduil that it does to him.

The next morning dawns bright and clear, or as bright and clear as it ever does now. The light, when Bard wakes to it, seems terrible, and it takes him a moment to realise why – the end of the rainstorm meant the end of their guests visit. He sits in silence as they share a sparse breakfast, and says nothing when the three gather up their possessions. He says nothing as he unlocks the gun box, passing weapons back to their owners, and he wonders if this stalemate between them all had been what broke down the barriers between them all – not just him and Thranduil, but the children too.

No, he thinks as he watches Sigrid and Tauriel embrace. Some things will always happen the same way, regardless. There are tears in Tilda’s eyes as she looks up at the two new friends – the only new friends that she ever remembers having.

He turns to speak to Thranduil, but the man is already outside, and Bard hurries to catch up with him. He stands with his back to the church, his hands on his hips, his eyes on the skyline, as if deciding what to do next, where next to go.

“We’re thinking of moving on in the next couple of days,” Bard blurts out, not entirely certain that he has the nerve to do so until the words are out of his mouth. Thranduil turns to look at him over his shoulder, his scars stark in the light of the new morning. His grey eye is careful, considering, as he waits for Bard to say something more, and it might be his imagination, but Bard could have sworn that he could see something close to hope in them too.

“If you want to stick around,” Bard continues, after a pause that is just slightly too long. “Well, we could find the next place together, if you like.”

And then he smiles, just a little, and the line of Thranduil’s shoulders softens almost imperceptibly.

Whatever it is that has happened over this storm – and Bard isn’t sure if he could put a name on it that could adequately sum up what these few days of intimacy mean to him – feels almost tangible, and if he has learnt anything over the last few years, it is to hold on to those things most important, to cling to them with white knuckles and bloody fingers and screaming pain if you need to.

Thranduil takes just a half a step closer, but it is enough.

“I would miss your bath,” he says, with a toss of his hair, the movement too sharp, once again giving away that once it was longer, and there is a story to that, Bard knows, one story of many that he does not know yet, but he wants to hear them, wants to learn them in firelight and soft darkness, wants to learn them and so much more.

They turn back to the old church and the camp, and Thranduil’s shoulder brushes against his, just once.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](http://northerntrash.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
